Review: Skyfall’ the best Bond film ever

Since I said it in my theatrical review, I’ll repeat it here: “Skyfall” is simply the best Bond film ever, certainly my favorite.

Directed by Sam Mendes, this is the movie where James Bond finally grows up. He’s still as much the lovable rogue as ever, but he finally moves past that cheeky British public schoolboy persona that has carried him for 50 years in 22 other movies. “Skyfall” has the gunplay, verbal foreplay and bedroom action you have come to expect, and an old favorite from the 1960s even shows up looking cooler than ever. But when Bond takes a fall, literally, it leaves him shaken and, finally, stirred — and not exactly the man he was.

“Skyfall” begins with the superspy in hot pursuit of a villain through the streets and over the red-tiled rooftops of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul — on a motorcycle no less. It is a marvelously breathtaking choreographed chase. Eventually, the trail leads to the most psychologically twisted of Bond villains, Raoul Silva, played by Oscar winner Javier Bardem. With his blond hair and slightly effeminate manner, Silva is introduced delivering a creepy monologue about “rats.” As the camera moves ever closer — cinematographer Roger Deakins’ Oscar-nominated work is brilliant — Silva is in your face, unhinged and unsettling.

After years and years of silly plots, this Bond film tries to bring home some real issues with life and death consequences.

After a terrorist attack, we even see 007’s mysterious boss, M — played for the seventh time by the great Judi Dench — sadly surveying a room full of coffins draped in Union Jacks. When has a Bond film ever taken the time to mourn anyone?

There are also a number of new additions to the cast. Ralph Fiennes provides weight as the buttoned-down Gareth Mallory, M’s new superior in Parliament.

Ben Whishaw brings a slightly mischievous quality to the role of Q, and Bond is partnered at the film’s beginning with a woman, Eve (the always lively Naomie Harris).

Give credit to Mendes for reinvigorating the franchise. Even Adele’s lush theme song, nominated for an Oscar, is one of the best in the series.

•

“The Sessions,” based on a true story, tells of a disabled writer who has sex for the first time in his late 30s with a sex surrogate. Written and directed by Ben Lewin, it stars John Hawkes and Helen Hunt, who received an Oscar nomination for her role. Hunt portrays Cheryl Cohen Greene, the sex therapist Hawkes’ writer Mark O’Brien hires. The film is largely adapted from O’Brien’s article “On Seeing a Sex Surrogate,” and is set in 1988.

As a child, the writer had polio, which resulted in him losing control of much of his body but not the sensations. For Cheryl, having sex with someone like Mark is a new experience, too, and the film explores how this changes them both. The performances by Hawkes and Hunt are outstanding.

•

Stephen Chbosky turned his own novel, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” about a shy high-schooler in 1991, into a film. It stars Logan Lerman as the sad-sack teen and Ezra Miller and Emma Watson as new friends who perk up his life. The familiar story has a slight charm.

•

“The Man with the Iron Fists” is a martial-arts mash-up from hip-hop star RZA (aka Robert Diggs), of the group Wu-Tang Clan. Presented by Quentin Tarantino, the movie offers plenty of high-flying wire work and bloody business in this homage to the genre.